Edmund Alleyn

In 2016, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal organized a second retrospective titled Dans mon atelier, je suis plusieurs (In My Studio, I am Many), curated by Mark Lanctôt.

From shortly after his return in 1970 from France until his retirement in 1991, he held a teaching position at the University of Ottawa, to which he commuted, maintaining his studio in Montreal. Alleyn died of cancer on December 24, 2004, at the age of 73.

In 1990, he returned to figuration in his “Indigo” series which he exhibited at the Galerie d’art Lavalin and at the 49th Parallel in New York. At the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Sherbrooke in 2004, he showed his final series, “Les Éphmérides” (1995-2004) which consisted of 12 large canvases as well as ink washes that echoed his abstract and figurative work of the 1960s. Alleyn said of his work,

On his return to Canada, he was struck by the changes caused by the Quebec’s Quiet Revolution and in the early 1970s, created proto-installations depicting realistic, colourful figures taken from photographs of crowds attending the Expo 67 site, which he then painted on Plexiglas and installed in front of representations of sunsets. These he called his “Quebec Suite”. Eventually he created the moody private landscapes of his large-scale paintings done between 1983 and 1990.

From 1955 to 1970, Alleyn stayed in France twice for long periods of time. During this time, he at first explored lyrical abstraction. In 1958 and 1960, Alleyn was included in the selection of Canadian paintings featured in the Guggenheim International competition, and in 1959 he won the bronze medal at the São Paulo Biennale, then in 1960, with Graham Coughtry, Jean-Paul Lemieux, Frances Loring, and Albert Dumouchel, he represented Canada at the Venice Biennial. In the period 1962 to 1964, Alleyn’s growing interest in North American Indigenous art was reflected in ideographic and biomorphic forms and more colourful work, then by the mid-1960s he created “cybernetic” figurative painting. Afterwards, inspired by the 1968 uprisings in Paris, he experimented with film and technological sculpture, moving toward an imagery that came from technology, electronics and mass media. His Introscaphe 1 (1970) was one of the first multimedia works ever made. Shown at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, it consists of an egg-shaped capsule with space for one viewer, which visitors were invited to enter and go through a multisensory experience.

Edmund Alleyn (June 09, 1931 – December 24, 2004) had an art career that underwent many stylistic changes. He explored various styles of painting including abstraction, narrative figuration, technology and pop art, as well as different media. Citics feel that his inability to be categorized marks him as contemporary. Even more important, they say that he helped remove excessive compartmentalization from art practice.

Born in Québec City in 1931 to a family of English and Irish heritage, Edmund Alleyn attended the École des beaux-arts in Québec City, where he studied with Jean-Paul Lemieux and Jean Dallaire. In 1955, he won the Grand Prix aux concours artistiques de la Province de Québec and a grant from the Royal Society of Canada.